Getting Things Done (In 15 Minutes)

I’ve always appreciated the simple, real life approach of Getting Things Done by David Allen. One read is a good introduction but after that I find I need to come back to it. So coming across this primer was a great way to remind myself of the high-level implementation: GTD in 15 minutes – A Pragmatic Guide to Getting Things Done

Here’s a taste of what GTD is all about,

GTD—or “Getting things done”—is a framework for organising and tracking your tasks and projects. Its aim is a bit higher than just “getting things done”, though. (It should have been called “Getting things done in a much better way than just letting things happen, which often turns out not to be very cool at all”.) Its aim is to make you have 100% trust in a system for collecting tasks, ideas, and projects—both vague things like “invent greatest thing ever” and concrete things like “call Ada 25 August to discuss cheesecake recipe”. Everything!

Sound like all other run-of-the-mill to-do list systems, you say? Well in many ways it is, but there is more to it, and it’s really simple. Promise! So please read on.

One of the basic assumptions of GTD is that you are dumb—or, rather, that your subconsciousness is quite dumb when it comes to thinking about things you should have done. For example knowing you need to fix your bike before next week, but instead of reminding you when you actually drive by the bicycle shop, it implants an incessant feeling of “I need to remember… something” in your brain.

A great part of the “magic” is to convert both tasks and whims into physical and visible actions as you soon will see.